Roma Nova on Jo Frances Penn's Books and Travel podcast

Travel is a wide concept. It doesn’t just mean trotting up the steps to a plane or sitting back looking out of a train window, or even visiting entrancing and exotic places.

Travel can be in the mind, across hundreds or possibly thousands of years, into other realities and mentalities, even into an alternative […]

Choosing the colours of book covers

It’s a well-worn statement, a cliché even, that it’s the book cover that sells the book.

I’d refine that a little. What a cover does first is grab a browser’s attention, nothing more. You’ve made them pause, even stop to investigate further. If they pick it up or click on its image, that’s a second […]

Guns n’ things in Roma Nova

This could be a tricky subject, but if your stories have spies, special forces, military and special police units with a robust Roman attitude, you are going to get weapons of one sort or another. Anything else would be unrealistic.

However, my books are about people, not a way of seeing […]